Age has no mercy tonight or, or any other night for that matter. In my latest poetry class a student uncharacteristically asked me how old I was and I said Older than dirt, which drew a few titters. Age has never been much of an issue with me. As the saying goes, You're only as old as you feel. But yesterday I was using a handout I had made on how to teach calligraphy dated from 1980, and then it hit me—these kids' parents hadn't yet been born. I had scribed out the alphabetic family of shapes from my cabin under the live oak in Sonoma County. What meadow, what age? I was not yet 30, negotiating a tricky Saturn Return cycle and poetry was my consolation prize. I was given a bottomless suitcases of muses' words, their glad rags, their hand-me-downs. Today I listened to young girls read their newly minted poems about the goddess within. Amazingly, they were so unselfconscious as they incanted their poems to the four directions. We made something come alive today in that dreamy classroom. So what if Tom Hanks went to school there, it's a dungeon, no monk's cell of arcane learning. But somehow we circumnavigated our surroundings and suddenly we were all of one age, one mind, scribing the words on the water, deep in the well, slaking a thirst we didn't know was there, pondering the ages of Man.
2/4/2005 Writers' Group
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